Simon Paul Thurston

Sometimes it can be very difficult to get the word out regarding your product or your website.  No matter what you do, or how much time you spend creating content that is keyword rich, investing in ads, and in general struggling and investing to draw traffic – you simply do not see any results from your efforts.  Well – you aren’t alone.

 There are amost 100 million registered websites on the internet.  Over half of these, 50 million, are websites that are active and each one of them are screaming for attention fromt he internet public.

How do you Stand Out from the crowd?

It isn’t easy.  You have to think outside of the box.  You have to be different.   I will give you a scenerio about what has worked for me in the past, and I can gaurantee that if you try it – you may see a tremendous explosion in visits.  The key to your success is how well you can infect people with a virus.

 No…not a real virus!  Viral Marketing.

Beat the Competition

Sometimes, even if you have the greatest product or service – if you can’t get traffic, you won’t sell a thing.  If people don’t know you exist, how are they supposed to buy anything from you?  Half of the battle in this business is making people aware of you. 

Viral marketing is a unique technique to get your brand or product in front of people.  It uses an indirect approach to conduct advertising, but it does it in a way that reaches a large number of folks in a very short period, and it also does it in a way that feels more like entertainment to people, and much less like “advertising”.

An effective Viral Marketing campaign is one that motivates people to forward the email or website to all of their friends.  The most effective viral marketing tactic is to use humor, usually in the form of a very funny video, that people find so hilarious that they forward it to everyone they know.

Believe it or not, this can be as simple as developing your own little skit using a home video.  Try to make the movie of something that is of a similar subject to your website or the product that you sell.  For example if you have a website that is an affiliate website for car insurance companies – then you’ll want to make a funny segment about car insurance.  If you can develop a video that will have people in stitches laughing, then you’ve got it made.  Test it on family first and see if it gets the desired reaction.  If it does – then enter the editing room.

Brand The Viral Movie

The reason viral marketing works is because people remember the humor.  If you properly brand the video, they will also remember your website.  The way to do this is not to attach your website to credits at the end – but instead create a very impressive opening screen where your website is displayed very large, in bold, in bright lights.  This is the opening title screen and it should be significant enough so that there’s no questioning that the movie they are about to see is tied directly to your website.

I know that this works – because I once conducted such a campaign for a charity.  I created a video, tagged the name of the charity website on the title screen, and sent it to only five of my closest friends.  I suggested that if they thought it was funny that they should forward to their friends and family.  Now the charity’s website traffic was normally, at best, only about 200 to 250 people every day.  About a week after I had sent out the viral marketing video - the Charity’s website unique visitor count had tripled to over 600 people every day.  Within a month, the Charity was seeing 2000 visitors every single day.  After a while, the numbers settled back down, but they never went back to the original bottom count. 

What this experiment proved to me, however, was that the psychology behind viral marketing works.  People love to share things, and friends forward eachother email all the time.  When it comes from a friend, it’s more likely to be opened and read.  When it comes from a stranger – it’s just “spam”.

Viral marketing is the single most effective way to get around the “spam” filter – by providing people with a small piece of entertainment in exchange for them letting you flash your website name and brand across the screen before the video.

Most people love the humor of the video so much that they don’t care – but the numbers show that some people not only tolerate it – but a significant number of people even take the time to visit the website!

I have no doubt at all that viral marketing is one of the most effective advertising campaigns for any website.